A. C. Bradley - Works

Works

The outcome of his five years as Professor of Poetry at Oxford University were A. C. Bradley’s two major works, Shakespearean Tragedy (1904), and Oxford Lectures on Poetry (1909). All of his published work was delivered earlier as lectures. Bradley's pedagogical manner and his self-confidence made him a real guide for many students to the meaning of Shakespeare. His influence on Shakespearean criticism was so great that the following anonymous poem appeared:

I dreamt last night that Shakespeare’s Ghost

Sat for a civil service post.

The English paper for that year

Had several questions on King Lear

Which Shakespeare answered very badly

Because he hadn’t read his Bradley.

(Hawkes 1986 as cited in Taylor 2001: 46)

Though Bradley has sometimes been criticised for writing of Shakespeare's characters as though they were real people, his book is probably the most influential single work of Shakespearean criticism ever published. Bradley's influence is perhaps better deserved than later critics acknowledge, for his readings of Shakespeare demonstrate an exquisite moral perceptiveness. For example, Bradley's treatment of Hamlet in Shakespearean Tragedy is an excellent corrective to the over-dreamy picture of Hamlet we inherit from the Romantics, for Bradley shows why Hamlet is not merely a soft contemplative, incapable action, but a truly great-souled figure, worthy of tragedy. Such appreciative criticism can be quite helpful to readers who are looking to understand what Shakespeare himself wrote and meant. Shakespearean Tragedy has been reprinted more than two dozen times and is itself the subject of a scholarly book, Katherine Cooke's A. C. Bradley and His Influence in Twentieth-Century Shakespeare Criticism.

By the mid-twentieth century his approach became discredited for many scholars; often it is said to contain anachronistic errors and attempts to apply late 19th century novelistic conceptions of morality and psychology to early 17th century society. Kenneth Burke's 1951 article "Othello: An Essay to Illustrate a Method" counters a Bradleyan reading of character, as L. C. Knights had earlier done with his 1933 essay "How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?" (John Britton has pointed out that this was never a question actually posed by Bradley, and apparently was made up by F. R. Leavis as a mockery of "current irrelevancies in Shakespeare criticism.") Since the 1970s, the prevalence of poststructuralist methods of criticism has resulted in students turning away from his work, although a number of scholars have recently returned to considering 'character' as a historical category of evaluation (for instance, Michael Bristol).

Bradley delivered the 1907–1908 Gifford Lectures at the University of Glasgow, entitled "Ideals of Religion." Bradley's other works include "Aristotle's Conception of the State" in Hellenica, ed. Evelyn Abbott, London : Longmans, Green, 1st ed. 1880, 2nd ed., 1898, Poetry for Poetry's Sake (1901), A Commentary on Tennyson's In Memoriam (1901), and A Miscellany (1929).